All the Arts, All the Time

Autry National Center withdraws expansion plan

In a move that concedes a measure of victory to long-term opponents, the Autry National Center has bowed out of a protracted battle for a $175-million expansion of its facility in Griffith Park.

City approval of the plan hinged on a recent demand for the Autry to make a legally binding commitment to support the Southwest Museum
located in Mt. Washington, as a fully functioning art institution in
perpetuity. In a letter delivered to members of the Los Angeles City
Council Tuesday, the Autry stated that such a commitment would be
irresponsible and that it is withdrawing its proposal.

“Any
further attempt to proceed with the proposed expansion project in
Griffith Park would be an ill-advised diversion of our financial
resources and an insupportable distraction from our work in serving the
community,” Autry President John L. Gray states in the letter. “We come
to this decision with reluctance and deep regret — but the constant
delays, the past and future costs, the unyielding insistence on
financial and programmatic commitments which we cannot responsibly
make, and the prospect of future expensive and debilitating litigation
all demand that we fulfill the Autry’s vision under different
circumstances.”

Councilman José Huizar, whose district includes the Southwest Museum, said the decision caught him by surprise.

“I
was expecting more rounds of negotiation,” he said. “It didn’t make
sense to me that there would be a $175-million commitment to the
expansion of the Griffith Park site and that the Autry wouldn’t want to
make a commitment to financial support at the Southwest Museum site. We
had an opportunity to come up with something that would be mutually
beneficial. ...It’s unfortunate, but I don’t see this as a step back.
It creates an opportunity for us to move forward on a new path that
puts the two sites on equal footing.”

The proposed expansion
would have increased the Griffith Park facility from 142,000 square
feet to 271,000 square feet, including exhibition and visible storage
space for the Southwest’s collection. Plans for the Southwest, which
will proceed, call for storing about half of the Native American
collection at Mt. Washington and presenting exhibitions there.
Programmatic changes include using some galleries for community
meetings, creating an archaeology laboratory and converting the Braun
Library into an educational facility.

Speaking as an Autry
trustee and chairman of the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians, Marshall
McKay said he is deeply disappointed with what he views as a necessary
decision.

“The Southwest Museum has one of the most paramount
Native America collections west of the Mississippi. To have it in a new
building in Griffith Park, as envisioned by the board at the Autry,
would have been spectacular. I think some of the people in the
Southwest’s neighborhood are missing the point that the Autry has put
in a great deal of money and effort into conserving the collection and
preserving the building. We are going to continue to do so because it’s
a historic place. It’s not something we want to turn away from.”

But
Nicole Possert, chairwoman of the Friends of the Southwest Museum
Coalition, which has frequently challenged the Autry’s actions and
questioned its intentions, said the latest move “continues to cast a
light on their refusal to find a win-win solution that upholds their
responsibility.”

Eliot Sekuler, a member of the Southwest
Society, another community group that has sought written assurance of
the Southwest Museum’s future, said the Autry has made “a grand gesture
of goodwill” in caring for the building and collection, but long-term
operating funds continue to be a cause for concern.“I am hopeful
that this change of course will signal a renewed focus on the Autry’s
plans for exhibiting the collection both at Griffith Park and the
historic Mt. Washington campus,” he said.

The Autry, named for
singing cowboy Gene Autry, opened in 1988 as a museum of the American
West and merged with the Southwest in 2003. The partnership — sometimes
disparaged as the Autry cowboys’ subjugation of the Southwest Indians —
rescued L.A.’s oldest museum from financial ruin, but sparked fears the
Autry would grab the Southwest’s valuable, 250,000-piece Native
American collection and close its aging building or turn it into an
insignificant outpost.

The Autry has spent $7.5 million repairing
and renovating the 1914 building and devoted additional resources to
cleaning, conserving and cataloging the vast holding of Native American
art and artifacts. But the Southwest’s galleries are closed for the
rehabilitation and conservation project, and the Autry’s vision of the
museum’s future has done little to alleviate suspicion.

The
controversy came to a head June 30 at a hearing conducted by the City
Council’s Board of Referred Powers. At issue were the Autry’s
environmental impact report and an amendment to its $1-a-year lease on
13 acres in the park.

At the request of Huizar, the panel
delayed its decision for four weeks and asked the councilman to
negotiate a written agreement with the Autry. After meeting with Gray
and the Autry’s board of trustees, Huizar was given an additional month
to negotiate by his Council colleagues. But the letter says that the
Autry was not informed of the extension.

“Because the Autry, like
all cultural institutions, depends on grants, annual fundraising and
other revenue sources that are not consistent year to year, we cannot
responsibly make commitments that are not secured by pledges, grants or
other specified funding,” Gray states in the letter.

The Autry’s
vision will not change, Gray told The Times. The exhibition program
will go forward, including a landmark show of the Southwest’s basket
collection opening in November at the Autry, and some storage space in
the Griffith Park building will be converted to galleries and publicly
visible storage for Native American objects.

Still, scrapping
long-laid plans is “horrible,” he said. “I don’t know what else we
could have done. Cultural institutions exist only with broad public
support. We wanted to make the Southwest Museum more interesting to the
public and create a broader level of support for it.”